Sports

Wolfe ready to get back on field for Broncos

DE dealt with scary ordeal last season

Broncos defensive end Derek Wolfe works out team headquarters in Englewood. (Hyoung Chang / The Denver Post)

Even when Derek Wolfe was not of sound mind or body, his competitive instincts never betrayed him.

It was the final Saturday night of November, and while the Broncos were gathered for a team meeting at a Kansas City-area hotel conference room in preparation for the next day's game against the rival Chiefs, their starting defensive end was coming out of a 26-hour, medically induced coma.

Hospital doctors made a mistake. They should have kept Wolfe comatose for at least 27 hours.

The first voice Wolfe heard was that of his brother, Josh Pastore, who had flown in from New Jersey. Wolfe had been trying for months to get his brother out to Colorado for a visit.

The first words Wolfe spoke: "About time."

Then he saw Corey Oshikoya, the Broncos' assistant trainer who had stayed with Wolfe from the moment Terrance Knighton yelled "Stop the bus!" from the back seat of the team bus to the airport a day earlier.

From his hospital bed in Denver, Wolfe asked "Osh" if he would be able to play against the Chiefs the next day in Kansas City.

Oshikoya reminded Wolfe that he was in an intensive care unit.

Last week, as he sat in the office of Broncos strength and conditioning coach Luke Richesson, Wolfe still was struggling to precisely describe how he had fallen so ill last season.

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A 23-year-old elite athlete who was the first player the Broncos selected in the 2012 draft should not have stressed his nervous system to the point he was sleeping only two hours a night, losing weight no matter how much he ate, and getting loaded into the back of an ambulance with a heartbeat of 20 and blood-sugar level at 40. (The blood-sugar level should have been between 100 and 140, considering he had just eaten a meal.)

The Broncos drafted Wolfe with the No. 36 pick overall early in the second round as much for his fierce style as the fact that he was a rare 295-pound defensive tackle who had the agility to rush the quarterback.

But after getting six sacks and leading NFL rookie defensive linemen in playing time percentage, Wolfe's second pro season began with two bouts of food poisoning and a preseason neck injury that was diagnosed as a contusion of the spinal cord. His weight dropped to 265 pounds and he had only one sack through the Broncos' first seven games.

Through it all, the maniacal Wolfe was training three times per day.

Doctors said Wolfe suffered a slight seizure during the team's bus ride to Denver International Airport on Nov. 29, 2013. But what really happened is Wolfe short-circuited his nervous system. He had pushed his body to such extreme limits, his body couldn't take it anymore.

He credits the Broncos' medical team, led by trainer Steve "Greek" Antonopulos, and yoga classes with bringing him back.

"Yoga really helped connect my mind and body back together," Wolfe said. "Because really the issue was my nervous system had become so disconnected from my body that I didn't feel like myself. I didn't look like myself. I didn't sound like myself. Nothing that was going on was me. I wasn't playing like myself. Even during the season, I wasn't playing like I normally play. The physicality I like to play with, I didn't have it because I didn't have the weight. I had the strength, but the weight wasn't behind it."

"Stop the bus!"

The day after Thanksgiving last year, Wolfe looked fine as he said hello to a reporter in the Broncos' locker room. He was about to eat a big lunch. His weight was 275 — 10 pounds lighter than the weight he had settled on as a rookie, but also up 10 pounds from earlier in the season.

He had been playing well, getting sacks in three consecutive games through a key home division victory against the Chiefs on Nov. 17, which was a Sunday night national TV game.

The Broncos were about to play the Chiefs again, this time at Kansas City. As always, Wolfe headed to the back of the bus. He sat by himself in one row, just behind Shaun Phillips. Louis Vasquez was seated across the aisle. Von Miller was seated directly behind Wolfe and Knighton was behind Miller.

"Felt great at practice, felt good getting on the bus," Wolfe said. "I get on the bus and it felt like I was getting carsick. That's all it felt like. Next thing you know, I'm in a dead sweat. And my vision starts getting blurry. And then my teammates starting asking 'What's wrong?' And I couldn't respond. I couldn't say anything. I could just feel my body shutting down."

Wolfe's teammates were confused at first, then scared.

"He was sleeping and Von looked at him and he was sweating profusely," Knighton said. "There was sweat everywhere. That just didn't look right. Me and Von were like, 'Wolfe! Wolfe!' And he wasn't responding."

A couple of players tried to wake him up, have him sip from a water bottle. NFL players have been long programmed to remain poised through tense situations. But serenity now wasn't getting it done.

Knighton yelled: "Stop the bus!"

As Wolfe was being loaded into an ambulance, he started vomiting. Then he started fighting.

"They said I was so strong, they couldn't hold me down," Wolfe said. "I was ripping out of restraints. They had to induce a coma because I was so out of control."

On game day, Sunday morning, Wolfe received a visit from coach John Fox and his wife, Robin. Fox was away from the team because of his own medical issue. The Broncos beat the Chiefs that day and after the team plane returned to Denver, Knighton and Miller went immediately to the hospital to check on their teammate.

Wolfe looked awful.

"I couldn't really explain to the doctors how I was feeling," Wolfe said. "I was going through serious depression. I had never dealt with that before."

The stress of worrying about his neck injury, his weight loss and his performance had burdened him even before he was hospitalized.

"Then after that happened, (the depression) was twice as bad," Wolfe said. "When you're hurt and you're feeling sorry for yourself, you're going to go through a little depression. But the worst part of the aftereffects was, I would look in the mirror and I didn't know who I was looking at. The issues I was having with problem-solving were ridiculous. I couldn't feel any emotion."

"Something's wrong"

Near as Wolfe can figure, the first food poisoning episode before training camp, followed by a bad batch of spinach during camp, "started my downward spiral."

His weight was down when the Broncos played a preseason game at Seattle on Aug. 17. Wolfe was high-lowed by two blockers and wound up leaving the field in an ambulance.

"Normally that wouldn't have happened to me," Wolfe said. "I'm normally confident when I play, but because I was light, I was fidgety. I felt like every time I hit somebody, I had to put everything I had behind it."

He rested for three weeks, but he was in the Broncos' starting lineup for the season opener against Baltimore. Looking back, he said, he probably should have taken more time off.

"Really, it was my fault," Wolfe said. "I should have been more aware of what was going on. I had symptoms that I was not reporting, symptoms I was ignoring to myself because I was afraid of wondering if the issue was my neck. Really, it wasn't my neck. The neck injury had something to do with me losing all that weight. And losing all that weight had something to do with my nervous system being screwed up."

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